Best of '98: Moments out of time

Film Comment, Jan, 1999

* Shrapnel hanging in the air, every shard in razor-sharp focus, as if molecules of the film itself had been startled out of the emulsion by the intensity of battle: Saving Private Ryan ...

* A bird born dying in battle: The Thin Red Line ...

* A tumbleweed in L.A.: The Big Lebowski ...

* A sopping-wet black thing drags out of swampwater and mist ... the swinish sound of lungs laboring to relearn breathing: Beloved ...

* The most genuinely felicitous meet-cute in living memory, Out of Sight: In the trunk of a getaway car, Federal marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) and prison escapee Jack Foley (George Clooney) talk movies -- e.g., Three Days of the Condor, with Faye Dunaway "and Robert Redford when he was young" ...

* A dying woman (Meryl Streep) opens her arms to her lost husband (William Hurt) and spoons him -- fully dressed -- in their bed: One True Thing ...

* Burning Dad, the brute (James Coburn) who, having let his wife die of cold, wraps himself in fake grief: "I shoulda froze." -- Affliction ...

* In an elevator, at war with her asshole husband (Martin Donovan), Living Out Loud's Judith (Holly Hunter) aims a sudden-death glare at the hapless nerd caught in close-quarters crossfire -- without missing a beat in her rant....

* Four bare legs wavering in the air: Steve Prefontaine (Billy Crudup) and friend trying to fuck standing on their heads in Without Limits ...

* A token of love. Rushmore: Miss Cross (Olivia Williams) asks the affectless suitor at her door (Bill Murray) if he would like a carrot: "Sure," he answers with passionate diffidence....

* Dubious black man, seeing Senator Jay Billington Bulworth (Warren Beatty) on the town with Nina (Halle Berry): "Is you a nigger?" Bulworth to dubious black man: "Is you?" ...

* Burnt-out Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy) smiling at the pretty girl (Radha Mitchell) who's so earnestly critiquing her photographs in High Art: "That's okay, I haven't been deconstructed in a long time." ...

* Gods and Monsters: James Whale's (Ian McKellen) eyes -- tender, crafty, lecherous - as he gazes out at the hunk (Brendan Fraser) who cuts his grass ...

* Primary Colors: "Jack Stanton could also be a great man ... if he weren't such a faithless, thoughtless, disorganized, undisciplined shit." Holding forth on an airport tarmac, the great man's enraged wife (Emma Thompson), just before she succumbs to sweet talk and "Primrose Lane" ...

* In a treehouse, snails splayed on a little girl's flesh ... the off-kilter sensuality of something like seduction, something like rape in A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries ...

* Arm in arm with her "poet" (Richard E. Grant), tipsy Rosemary (Helena Bonham Carter) buttonholes a snotty maitre d' to ask, in deadpan upperclass register, if he might recommend a nearby "secluded bower" ... A Merry War....

* Bud painting his "mother"`s face black and white again -- Toby Maguire and Joan Allen in Pleasantville ...

* Out of Sight: retired-cop dad (a twinkling Dennis Farina) interviewing daughter's married FBI boyfriend (Michael Keaton, sublimely thick). Visible through the window, Karen stands on a dock talking on a cell phone with the runaway convict who charms her....

* Wicked: Homicide detective Michael Parks, showing up to check out a suburban crime scene, points a Jay Leno--style "Hey there!" finger at a lady cop on the sidelines....

* Sergeant Hill (Paul Giamatti), bone weary anti terminally fed up, leans his rifle against a post ... which tips against and brings down a wall, revealing a roomful of German soldiers mere feet away from the Yanks -- Saving Private Ryan ...

* Year's best weather: the New Hampshire winter of Affliction, the Georgia hurricane of The Gingerbread Man ...

* A mother (Meryl Streep) stopping her daughter (Renee Zellweger) on a snowy street glowing with Christmas lights to savor the sound of the town she's always lived in ... the rumble of furnaces ... One True Thing ...

* Season after season. Beloved's clapboard house stands above a country road: primal zones of past and future, staying and going, womb anti rite of passage, peculiarly American dialectics ...

* In Stepmom, the range of expressions that pass over the face of a woman (Susan Sarandon) just diagnosed with cancer as her ex-husband (Ed Harris) tells his news first: he's marrying the younger woman (Julia Roberts) she loathes ...

* Judith in Living Out Loud, at a nightclub called The Confessional: at play in the good company of women ...

* In Primary Colors. Libby Holden (Kathy Bates) presses a gun, safety off. into a hapless conspirator's groin: "I'm a gay lesbian woman. I do not mythologize the male organ!" ...

* The slow fading of black hate as skin-head (Ed Norton) and homeboy (Guy Torre) fold white sheets in a prison laundry -- American History X ...

* Nick Nolte against the "rosy-fingered dawn," The Thin Red Line ...

* Mrs. Ryan's kitchen window, Saving Private Ryan ...

* "The amazing Francie Barrett" (Eamonn Owens) in his mother's faded apron. industriously sweeping up around the chair where his dead father (Stephen Rea) decays: The Butcher Boy ...